The other side of Obama’s UN speech

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) is a site that seeks to provide aspects of news coverage that get left out in mainstream coverage. If the site has a bias it is to the left, but in their efforts to be fair they critique Democrats as well as Republicans. The following report is on Obama’s speech to the UN where the President went through the litany of myths about the Middle East believed by most people living in the US, but disbelieved by most people living anywhere else.

When the President speaks about US efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East, most of the world knows our history of doing just the opposite. For example, to prop up a dictatorship in Egypt for decades and then claim credit when a popular uprising deposes him is the stuff of global comedy, but you would not know that from US coverage of the President’s speech. To speak of “anti-American violence in the Muslim world” and not mention US violence against Muslims worldwide, which is many times greater, will only be taken seriously in our own insular nation willfully ignorant of anything happening our side our own boundaries and interests. As the article notes:

“The U.S. currently supports and arms autocratic and free-speech averse regimes in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Until recently, Tunisia and Egypt were U.S.-backed dictatorships. One might argue that the U.S. no longer overtly thwarts free speech and democracy in Tunisia, but that’s a harder case to make for Egypt, whose military the U.S. has continued to fund through decades of torture, detention and disappearances.”